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VSO Nepal 1981-1984
Applying to work in forestry in a developing country, I was lucky enough to be accepted by Voluntary Service Overseas, and offered the opportunity to join the ODA-funded Forestry Research Project in Nepal, to study bamboos and their incorporation into forestry programs. During 1981 I investigated the few bamboos in cultivation in the UK, visiting the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Kew, trained in development theory with VSO, learnt Nepali, and started working in E Nepal. Rising population levels in Nepal were increasing pressures on land, necessitating more efficient use of agricultural and forestry resources and techniques. The Forestry Research Project was researching the silvicultural requirements of a range of forestry crops, aiming to help farmers in remote Himalayan valleys through government, NGO and private forestry operations. Bamboo, though important to both agriculture and forestry, which are closely linked in small self-sufficient mountain farms, had not been covered by either profession. It was the novel idea of British forester John Wyatt-Smith to promote fodder trees and bamboos to Nepali foresters as more environmentally friendly crops than pines and eucalypts. Bamboos had been particularly neglected. Agriculturalists tended to look on anything that might compete with food crops with deep suspicion, and foresters discounted bamboos as they were not really trees. I was initially based within an agricultural research station in Pakhribas, East Nepal, established to resettle returning Gurkha soldiers. I started to study the subtropical bamboos of E Nepal from there, working mainly on identification, uses and potential propagation techniques. This was an exciting time to be working in Nepal. Community involvement in forest establishment and management was leading to the development of new approaches to forestry. NTFPs were starting to be appreciated. The causes and remedies for soil erosion and degradation were being investigated, and different uses of plants for purposes such as road protection were being developed. Bamboos turned out to have more of a role than anyone had expected, and the time with VSO ran out well before the challenges. ODA Postgraduate Training Award Scheme (PTAS) 1984-1986
After 3 years with VSO, working latterly with counterpart staff within the Research Division in the Government Forestry Department in Kathmandu, we had been able to establish which bamboos were important in both E & C Nepal, and how the propagation of several could be incorporated into good nursery practice. ODA (now DFID) kindly supported me, through their PTAS scheme, to continue the study of bamboo distribution and propagation techniques for a further 18 months, and to develop a training program for nursery foremen from nearly all the districts in the country from the many forestry and agricultural projects. In 1985 I was fortunate enough to visit E China for an INBAR conference in Hangzhou, and took the opportunity to travel back to Nepal across China & Tibet, also visiting Bhutan. This helped me to start to put the Nepalese bamboos into a broader regional context. It was becoming apparent that poor naming and identification was a major obstacle to any work on bamboos throughout the region, whether it was writing a guide to their recognition, selection, uses, and site requirements, or recommending techniques for propagation or protection against insects. Research Fellow, University of Aberdeen 1986-1991
With funding from the ODA Forestry Research Program, I established a further bamboo project, administered through the Forestry Department of Aberdeen University, but implemented through the Forestry Departments in Nepal and Bhutan. The aim was to expand earlier propagation and training work through the many forestry projects across Nepal, and also to include forestry projects in Bhutan as well. A further objective was the study of the identification of all the available bamboos of both countries in much more depth, and this become the theme of a PhD thesis. Tissue culture experiments were also carried out in Aberdeen, to see if in vitro multiplication was a feasible propagation technique. By 1991, I had developed simple vegetative propagation techniques suitable for indigenous bamboos in forestry nurseries in Nepal, and trained nursery workers from across the country in their use. I had collected seed of Dendrocalamus hamiltonii, distributed it across Nepal and Bhutan, and also raised 20,000 seedlings in a government nursery in S Bhutan, which were distributed to various government and NGO projects. Control measures for a serious pest were developed, as were techniques for using bamboos for roadside stabilisation on road-building projects in several parts of Nepal. Bamboo species from much of Nepal and Bhutan were more thoroughly enumerated, classified in accordance with recent developments in bamboo taxonomy in China, and described in a PhD thesis. Dissemination of these results, however, was far from adequate. Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, 1992-94
In order to publish research findings from the Himalayan fieldwork effectively, I established a further project in 1992, based in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, funded again by ODA. In 18 months there I refined my taxonomic skills under the kind guidance of botanists working on the Flora of Bhutan project, and published a revision of the bamboos of Nepal and Bhutan in a series of 3 papers in which I described a new genus as well as many new species and varieties. In order to produce field guides to the bamboos of Nepal and Bhutan, I studied the new techniques of desktop publishing, and used them to combine information on field identification, propagation, distribution and uses with line drawings. I produced camera ready copy for the field guides and a series of papers in Edinburgh’s Journal, and presented my work at a meeting of the European Bamboo Society at Kew in 1993. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1994-2000
In 1994, Kew Gardens advertised for a short-term bamboo specialist. From 1994 to 2000 funding was obtained by the Kew Foundation for the HSO post, titled Sino-Himalayan Bamboos. Support was from Dr Seng Tee Lee of Singapore, and I was employed under 4 short-term contracts. Working in the grasses section of the Herbarium under Steve Renvoize, I was given responsibility for temperate bamboos, with the exception of genus Phyllostachys, which Steve remained the expert on, while Research Fellow Dr Soejatmi Dransfield specialized in tropical bamboos, especially those of Thailand and Madagascar. I also had responsibilities for the naming and verification of plants in the living collections in collaboration with gardens staff, especially Ray Townsend, Vice President of the UK Bamboo Society. Working with the other bamboo specialists I reorganized the herbarium bamboo collections at Kew, to follow a more modern system of generic and subtribal classification. I verified the identification of more than 70 living bamboos in the Gardens, many of which had been given rather questionable names, and developed links with bamboo taxonomists and horticulturalists from around the world, as well as the lead international bamboo research organisations, INBAR and IPGRI. In collaboration with Chinese bamboo experts on both tropical and temperate bamboos, fieldwork was undertaken in Yunnan Province of China. We started to revise the temperate bamboos from that Province, publishing papers in Kew Bulletin, and bringing back several horticulturally important species. In conjunction with Dr W. D. Clayton, I studied the morphology and terminology for bamboos in depth, so that their characters could be incorporated into the Kew World Grass Species database. I developed knowledge of bamboos from a much wider range of countries, and acquired further skills: databasing, cladistics, DNA extraction and techniques of molecular investigation. In collaboration with the Jodrell Laboratory and Trinity College, Dublin, I participated in a molecular ITS & AFLP study in the genus Phyllostachys, and started to co-supervise a Trinity College PhD student, developing a molecular phylogeny for Asian bamboos. I tackled several nomenclatural problems, and published a variety of papers and articles in books, journals and horticultural periodicals, including the bamboo account for the Flora of Bhutan. Independent bamboo botanist/consultant, May 2000-2006
Flora of China (Missouri Botanical Garden)After May 2000, I approached various organisations involved in bamboo research, and in 2001 Missouri Botanical Garden kindly offered me a part-time co-authorship and editorial role, as they wished to publish a modern English-language bamboo account for their Flora of China Project. It was slowly being written by a team of about 20 Chinese authors, under the co-ordination of Dr Li De-Zhu of the Kunming Institute of Botany, with whom I had collaborated previously. This was a good opportunity to apply recent phylogenetic results, and to expand my bamboo expertise further, as Chinese bamboos represent half the world’s bamboo diversity. Missouri’s Flora of China account complemented continuing molecular investigations at Trinity College Dublin, on which I am collaborating with Dr Trevor Hodkinson. Establishing an evidence-based phylogenetic framework for the flora involved collaboration with several bamboo taxonomists from China and the Western world. Developing this classification, applying them to the Chinese bamboo flora, and making necessary taxonomic changes kept me well occupied, on a self-employed basis, until 2006 when the account was finished. Publication of the numerous papers that the flora work necessitated, including the molecular phylogeny, is a problem now that the funding has finished.
Conservation (INBAR)Conservation of threatened bamboo species is an issue that has been sadly neglected by all institutions, largely through lack of information on identification and distribution. INBAR in 2000 initiated an ambitious project to quantify global bamboo resources and distribution. By combining GIS assessments of areas of forest types, held by UNEP-WCMC, with information on which bamboo species were found in each forest type gleaned from botanical literature at Kew, it was hoped that global standing volumes of bamboos could be estimated. This was found to be somewhat optimistic, as the data could only suggest possible habitat area, and was restricted to forest bamboos. My experience of collecting rare forest bamboos, however suggested that the data might instead be highly valuable in quantifying remaining suitable habitat areas for the many rare or threatened forest species. The data produced approximated roughly to conservation’s ‘area of occupancy’ concept, for which threshold levels are defined for different categories of threat to plants and animals. INBAR consequently followed up on this suggestion by funding me to analyse the data in this regard and collaborate on publications with UNEP-WCMC. I found that a frighteningly high proportion of bamboos had very restricted ranges of occupation indeed, making them highly vulnerable to deforestation. The result was publication of a collaborative paper in Biodiversity & Conservation, and then a report on Asian bamboo conservation published jointly by INBAR and UNEP-WCMC. That was followed by a second report from INBAR & UNEP/WCMC, which completed the study for the rest of the world. Such a baseline study should hopefully stimulate measures to address the problem, or at least to verify the situation on the ground, but funding seems hard to find.
Flora of North America (Utah State University)During this period involvement with bamboo taxonomy and horticultural activities in the US led to the suggestion by Dr Mary Barkworth of Utah State University that cultivated bamboos should be included in the grass account for the Flora of North America. Production of this account is a challenge as the introductions are from a wide range of countries, including Japan and S America. Undertaken on a shoestring budget, and without fieldwork in either N America or the countries of origin, the inclusion of bamboos in the FNA account along with other grasses was rather ambitious, and could not be completed within the time available. Further funding is still hoped for in order to complete the project, with the account being repackaged to form the Cultivated Bamboos section of this website. My horticultural involvement in the US continues, as editor of the Species List for the American Bamboo Society, which annually revises names under which bamboos are sold across the US, which in UK terms is effectively a ‘Bamboo Plant Finder’. I was also on the Board of Directors of the ABS as International Director from 2003 to 2007, and I have been made an honorary life member.
Consultancies (INBAR, CABI, IFAD)As well as contracts with INBAR in association with bamboo conservation, I produced bamboo data sheets for the Forestry Compendium of Tree Species CD-ROMs, produced by CAB International in 2001 and 2003, and participated in a NE India Forestry Project reconnaissance mission as a consultant for IFAD in 2000.
Bamboo Phylogeny Group (Iowa & Idaho State Universities/NSF)Bamboo taxonomy and conservation is now perceived to be a pressing international priority, and as flowering material is scarce, multi-gene molecular studies are highly appropriate. Following the establishment in the US of a successful grass phylogeny working group, a similar collaborative project has been established by Iowa & Idaho State Universities, with a grant from NSF. I started collaborating on this project, primarily on a voluntary basis. The aims were to develop morphological character lists for coding all bamboos, to coding character states for the temperate genera, and to undertake collaborative fieldwork in W China, backed up by molecular analysis undertaken in Idaho and Dublin. Unfortunately this small project was the only one to materialize in 2006-7, and on its own the funding was not sufficient for my bamboo research to remain a viable proposition.
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